


Déja Vu

by Crescence



Series: Deja Vu [1]
Category: Eyewitness (US TV)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Anne Shea Deserved Better, Everyone practicing how to be a family, Freeform, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Internalized Homophobia, Lukas Waldenbeck Feels, M/M, Philip Shea Feels, Philkas - Freeform, Philkas learning to be there for each other, Post-Series, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pretty much a month of pain and healing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-21
Updated: 2017-01-09
Packaged: 2018-09-10 22:26:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 9,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8941813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crescence/pseuds/Crescence
Summary: Specks of dust swirl in the gold of sunlight pooling through the break in his curtains. Philip watches their listless dance, listening to the hum of silence. It was a game he used to play with his mother. Day stars she used to say, smiling like she could see the universe painted across blenched wallpapers. It hadn't occurred to Philip yet, she probably was. They'd chase constellations in the lazy descent of things shriveled and dead. It was one of the first pictures he had taken.A pale hand rises beside him, pointing towards the cavalcade of dust drowning in light. Looks like stardust, Lukas says.Philip closes his eyes.





	1. Like Silence But Not Empty

**Author's Note:**

> There have only been a few things in my life that has touched me as deeply as Eyewitness did. I've written for two of them and would sell my soul for the third. For Eyewitness, I'd do both. I am not ready to let go so for an undetermined number of chapters I want to explore that one month Philip grieves the death of his mother and everyone becomes slightly more aware of life's impermanent nature. I have never left something I've started unfinished, so trust me when I say I'll finish this. I do work two jobs though, so bare with me if there isn't an update every day. 
> 
> PS: If I mention a song in the notes of any chapter, do check it out if you can. Music and writing are inseparable for me and sometimes nothing paints a picture and sets the pace of a moment better than a really good song.

 

* * *

 

 

Helen keeps a steady hand on his arm while she speaks. Her voice trembles like it did when she was holding the gun in her hand and a baby in her mind, all celadon eyes and freckles swimming before him against the glaring white of hospital fluorescent. Gabe is right beside him with an arm around his shoulders. At this moment, it doesn’t feel grounding, it feels like sinking into the ocean with an anchor around his neck.

A distant, detached part of his brain strings Helen’s words neatly in a line. Making sentences with nouns, adjectives and verbs; associating faces with names and actions with images. The rest of him pushes violently against the walls of his skin as pain explodes inside him. His lips part and a sound between a choked gasp and a moribund whimper cuts through his throat. Something rips inside him and he can’t breathe through the sear of it, his muscles lock in an agonizing tautness; the last sprint of a hunter’s prey.

Philip wants to run. Helen pulls him fiercely against her white, sweat-stained shirt. Apologizing through tears over and over again, her voice breaking like the linings of his own heart. _I couldn’t get to her in time. I’m sorry. I couldn’t save her. I’m sorry, Philip. I’m so sorry._ Gabe wraps them both in his arms and for the first time in his life, Philip has a glimpse into understanding what had kept Anne Shea alive all these years. How it is impossible to completely fall apart when there is someone keeping you together even if it meant patching your tears with pieces of their own skin.

 

 

Bo Waldenbeck hugs him outside Lukas’ room. Philip cannot do anything but let him, nodding at words his mind doesn’t register, eyes fixed on Lukas’ profile through the blinds of his window. He looks like a mirage breaking across desert sand. A crepuscular hallucination; a hand that lifts and the roar of a dirt bike at dawn when he had more tequila in his veins than he had blood. Every torn inch of him aches for him.

They let him in and Bo Waldenbeck tells him he can stay as long as he wants. Somewhere in the corridor he has lost his voice so he simply nods again.

Lukas is still sleeping. Philip stands at the edge of his bed and his agonized mind tries to reconcile the outrageous reality of them living in two different worlds in this suspended moment. In Lukas’, Anne Shea is still alive. Fragile thin in oversized knit sweaters and full of earnest warmth in delicate hands and a soft voice. A woman with a bad history and worse habits but a woman trying. A woman healing.

In Philip’s, she is all but _gone._ He wants to slip into Lukas’ oblivion, share the sedation with him but all he can do is hold his hand and pray to the same God that took his mother to keep Lukas safe.

The armchair barely makes a sound as he pulls it next to the bed. His fingers meet pale skin, lined with glaucous veins and his heartbeat quietly falls in sync with the mechanic beeps of Lukas’ heart monitor. Philip bows his head, leaning his forehead against Lukas’ arm on the bed. He still smells like the laundry starch from the bed sheets of Fallen Pines. Philip falls asleep crying.

 

* * *

 

 

The sounds reach him before he can will his eyes to open. The entire right side of his body feels weak with pain, like his flesh would rather peel off than keep trying to stretch over torn muscle and bones. His first conscious inhalation brings with it a wave of nausea and a maddening minute of dizziness that feels all the more disorienting with his eyes closed. Lukas listens to the beeps of his own heartbeat and breaths slowly until the spell passes.

He is the first thing Lukas sees, hunched over the left side of his bed on an armchair, head buried in the crook of his elbow. The panic churning bile in his stomach settles in an uneasy slumber. Philip doesn’t look hurt if only worse for wear. There’s a huge jacket slung over his shoulders and back Lukas recognizes as Mr. Caldwell’s.

His left hand barely has any feeling left in it with Philip sleeping on it but he doesn’t move. He reaches with his right, careful not to pull on his IV tube and cards his fingers through his hair. The feel of him is real, the smoothness of his unruly curls although in need of a shower, the warmth radiating off of him, the sound of his deep breathing. Lukas has no idea what happened between him being knocked out and waking up here. He remembers his father in a disconnected memory between two blocks of black emptiness. There is a strange sense of calm in his gut, as unfamiliar to him as hearing his father say those words.

He continues to run his fingers through Philip’s hair until he stirs awake. His mouth leaves a wet spot on his arm Lukas couldn’t mind any less. He slowly raises his head and looks down at the bed for a long moment before where he is seems to dawn on him and his eyes snap up to find Lukas’. Lukas feels the rush of his exhalation more than he hears it.

The calm in his gut shatters like flea-market china the moment Philip starts crying.

 

They let them stay together. Lukas doesn’t know if it’s his father or Gabe Caldwell that sets up the arrangement but Lukas is moved to another room and there is a second bed for Philip to stay for the night as a companion. He almost never uses it.

He almost never sleeps either. Even squeezed tight in the same bed and with Lukas’ arms around him, Philip barely gets a few hours of undisturbed sleep when nightmares and the aching enormity of his grief stay at bay. They share the nightmares and the faces of the dead in them so when either of them wakes the other up gasping for breath and pupils blown wide with terror, the other doesn’t even need to speak to help calm him down. They hold on, breathe and stare into each other’s eyes and wait for the reality to still around them, for the acute presence of the other to seep into icy fear and undo it fiber by fiber from the cages of their minds. In four days and three nights, Lukas loses count of how many tears Philip has cried that he has kissed away.  

Anne Shea never leaves the room. From the daily wordless staring at the ceiling to the night Lukas wakes up to the sound of running water and finds Philip crying with his knees up to his chest on the floor between the shower and the toilet, her loss has a sound to it that feels like silence. Lukas remembers the quiet of it, remembers the way how every room in every place had felt devoid of something requisite, something indispensible no one else but him seemed to notice. He remembers the frenzy in his own mind, trying to relive every memory of every moment to fill that emptiness shaped like ‘mother’ and how it was like making a call to somebody’s voice mail to listen to their voice but never have them pick up the phone.

Gabe Caldwell and Sheriff Torrance take turns staying at the hospital, if they aren’t both there at the same time. They bring fleece blankets, take-out pizza and lots of quiet touches with them they also share with him. To Lukas’ timid surprise, his father tries his hardest to do the same. Rose visits twice and Lukas sees how terrifying Helen can be when the FBI wants to question them two days after… everything.

His entire being, from the very extremities of his body to the pit of his soul feels absolutely bound to Philip. They live in a spaceless co-dependency that spins them in orbit around one another. Lukas learns to read him in ways he never thought he could learn another human being. He extends a hand before Philip even reaches for him. He can recognize the demons haunting him with a single look into his bottomless eyes. He knows when he is starting to get hungry, knows exactly when he will finally fall asleep with exhaustion. He learns how to touch him when he needs to be touched, when to hold him in a cocoon of fleece. He learns to tell the whisper of difference between when to push earbuds in his ears and lie with him listening to nothing but the sound of music to drown out the silence of what’s missing and when to lie still and listen to the emptiness with him.

 

 

* * *

 

 


	2. Ghosts Are Never Meant to Stay

* * *

 

On the fifth morning, Lukas is discharged. Bo Waldenbeck helps him get on the front seat of his truck and Philip stands by the passenger door, his hand halting right before he reaches for him through the window. The sting of the morning breeze raising the hair on his arms reminds him they are no longer enclosed within the walls of the hospital. The sting in his stomach he has gotten used to feeling for months reminds him this is still not allowed. His fingers curl into his palm.

 _Hey_ , Lukas says. Philip meets his gaze, eyes bluer than the cerulean expanding above him. Looking at him feels like standing under a waterfall. For a deep, drawn-out moment, the silence recedes.  
Lukas turns in his seat and reaches out with his left hand, holding the front of his shirt loosely. _I’ll see you soon._

Philip’s fists unclench on either side of him. He nods through an exhale and Bo Waldenbeck drives away, taking Lukas back home with him.

 

The silence follows him to the Caldwell farm. Philip tries to make noise, earbuds blasting music, loud against his eardrums as the ashen grey of dawn spills over the last shadows of the night in his room. He listens to the metallic scrape and chimes of the old truck in Gabe’s barn when he tinkers with it the same way he continues to live; without aim, without a clue as to why he is doing it. Cartoons splash color on the walls of the upstairs room at 4 am in the morning, flashing like camera shots in the dark as he stares through it. The silence doesn’t leave him.

Gabe tells him not to worry about school, that he is being given time for what has happened to him. He doesn’t understand the mercy of it when nothing has actually happened to him. Philip Shea isn’t the one who got shot. He isn’t the one who ODed with heroin in his veins. He isn’t the one who died alone in a bed.

It is Helen who takes him to see someone that can help. _An old friend of mine,_ she says with the same look in her eyes Philip used to think was disinterest but knows better now to recognize as a tremendously intricate wall inscribed with _Buffalo 07_. He also doesn’t understand why it is a little bit easier to breathe around her.

The silence goes with him.

Sitting in Helen’s jeep outside the clinic, he tells her he won’t be taking the sleeping pills he has been prescribed. The buzz of New York City traffic presses against the windows and it is familiar and loud in a way Tivoli never is, but Philip feels the silence most saliently here. It floods into him from the alleyways, dyeing the sore edges of him black. He remembers the movies and his mother’s staggering steps, dead plants she kept watering and the moldy smell of the yellow couch and it is near impossible to speak through the throbbing awareness of what’s missing. Helen’s eyes find his and when she asks quietly, _is it because of your Mom,_ Philip feels like drowning. He nods with an effort that feels like staying alive while bleeding to death and Helen holds his hand.

They go back home and she doesn’t bring it up again.

 

Lukas texts him 126 times the first day. Philip doesn’t know why he has counted but he acknowledges he has done stupider things when he couldn’t sleep at night.

The third night he breaks down. His sleepless body times out without the electronic chime of any warning and sends him headfirst into a nightmare as thick as tar right where he sits with knees up to his chest on Gabe’s armchair. It is Gabe’s hands he feels on his back when he wakes up to the sound of his own choked sobs and it is his words that ground him in the living room of the Caldwell farm in Tivoli, NY while his eyes watch, with terrifying longing, the ghost of Anne Shea hovering before him until she soundlessly fades into the amber light of night lamps with her sandals and long skirts.

It is Helen that tells him with a hand in his sweat slicked hair that ghosts aren’t meant to stay and no matter how impossible it may feel to him, he will learn to breathe again. Philip cries on her shoulder until the first light of morning.

 

* * *

 

 

Lukas remembers being afraid of his father for the majority of his life. The quick flare of his temper waiting at the bottom of the bottle and the abruptness of his blazing rage had always been a part of Bo Waldenbeck even when the gentle grace and easy humor of his mother was there to filter the memories of his past in sepia. Watching him from the passenger seat, Lukas wonders if his father wasn’t the only one that didn’t know how to deal with the family left behind once she was gone. Fear of his father’s fury had been a frigid breath on the nape of his neck all those years he had tried his hardest to please him but now he watches Bo Waldenbeck stay with him, watches him fight for him when Lukas destroys every single one of his dreams. The more he watches his father, the more he wonders just how much he had allowed himself to know him.

 

He will never get used to the feel of Philip against him. Across the threshold, just a few feet away from Gabe Caldwell sitting at the kitchen table, Philip buries his face in his neck and sags against him and Lukas can’t find a bone in his body that wants to push him away. Fallen Pines is a memory seared in flesh against flesh and missing him is a physical pain he feels in the hollows between his ribs. He breathes him in.

Lack of sleep makes him look near translucent. There had always been something otherworldly, something haunting about Philip Shea and the way his eyes simmer like flint stones beneath tired lids moves a keystone deep in the very foundations of his being. Lukas cups his face and softly kisses him on the lips.

The moment stills into suspension.

Gabe Caldwell leaves the room.

Slowly, very slowly, like an inverted imitation of the lazy ascent of the sun, Philip smiles.

Lukas' stomach aches.

 

At 6pm, the only sound in the Caldwell house is the faint murmur of music coming from Philip’s earphones. Lukas types _He is doing better. Don’t know when we’ll be back yet. Thank you for asking,_ on his phone with one hand and sends it to Rose. His other hand is buried root deep in Philip’s hair while he is breathing evenly against his stomach on the couch they are sprawled on. With his fingers whispering through curls somewhere between the nape of Philip’s neck to the crown of his head, Lukas dozes off with his head resting against the back of the couch. He slips from memory to memory, from the paralyzing dread of the cabin with three dead men and one monster, to the skin-melting heat of the motel room where he had entombed every last shred of his individuality into the fire of Philip’s skin, he floats on the surface of unconsciousness until he wakes up to the leaden grey of twilight swallowing the shadows of trees on the walls and the soft rustle of Gabe Caldwell gently laying a blanket over them.

Lukas feels himself flush but Gabe only smiles at him, mouthing _how long has he been sleeping_. Lukas checks his phone and whispers, _a little over three hours_. Gabe Caldwell momentarily closes his eyes with a sigh of relief and then he is patting Lukas’ head and the warmth of unconditional acceptance fills every last pore of him.  

 

 _“Mrs. Torrance? I mean.. Sheriff Torrance.”_  
_“Call me Helen please, Lukas.”_  
_“Uh, Helen. Okay.”_  
_“What’s up? Are you alright?”_  
_“Yeah, yeah I’m fine. I just… I thought of something that could help Philip. I mean, help him sleep.”_  
_“What is it?”_  
_“Uhm… He told me this thing some time ago. That he used to, when things got real bad, he would turn on the sink and listen to the sound of water. That it would help him forget. Made him feel safe, you know? … Sheriff Torrance, are you there?”_  
_“Yes, Lukas. I am here.”_  
_“Do you think, maybe, it might help?”_  
_“I have an idea that might. Thank you, Lukas.”_  
_“Yeah, yeah of course. I just… I’m worried about him.”_  
_“I know. He is worried about you too.”_  
_“I’m… I’m alright.”_  
_“Not yet, Lukas but It’ll get better. I promise.”_  
_“Yeah. Thanks, Mrs. Torrance.”_  
_“Helen.”_  
_“Helen. Thanks.”_  
_“Gabe’s bringing Chinese at 6. Don’t be late.”_  
_“I won’t. See you.”_  
_“You too.”_

* * *

 


	3. Mothers Forgive

* * *

 

Gabe’s pancakes have a softness to them Philip somehow associates with his childhood but can’t place in his thought. It stirs a disconnected sense of nostalgia in him that feels oddly dreamlike. Phantom traces of fleeting impressions like a story somebody once told him. He isn’t sure if he is remembering a memory he has no recollection of or if it is a dream that used to sleep nestled in the meat of his child’s heart that he exchanged for the sharp, barren honesty of reality as he grew up. It is one of those things that makes Gabe Caldwell burrow deeper in his timid heart.

Helen places a hand on his shoulder and slips a flash drive on the table next to him. _It’s for the night,_ she says and Philip looks up at her to find her looking at him the way she looks at Gabe; vulnerable, fiercely protective, a little surprised from finding herself momentarily submerged in the feeling of belonging to something.

 

The easy accent of Deputy Sheriff Tony Michaels filters through the two inch gap of his window as Philip clicks on the only folder on Helen’s flash drive, labeled _Philip_. There is an eight hour long audio file in it and for one absurdly surreal moment he thinks it is one of Helen’s audiobooks, only this time with a subject arguably more problematic than Parenting Your Foster Teenager. He unhooks his earphones from his phone and connects them to his laptop before he clicks on the file. Tony’s genial laughter drowns in the sound of pouring water and Philip’s eyes habitually close before he even realizes what he is listening.

Flowing and ebbing in a susurrating tide, the sound of water aligns with the restless current of the blood in his veins. An expansive calm trickles through the crevices of his aching bones and for a listless moment of absolute disengagement, Philip floats the surface of a deep, pendulous oblivion. The emptiness of spaces without Anne Shea remains, but in the sound of water, the silence of her absence quiets.

An hour later Philip texts Lukas.  
_Thank you._

Sixteen seconds later Lukas replies.  
_Just, dream of me._

 

The funeral is more beautiful than anything Anne Shea received while she was alive. In a varnished auburn casket she looks younger than the tender memory of her in Philip’s mind. Locks of castory brown hair rest on her slender chest adorned with January white carnations and her frail hands lay across her belly like she is taking a late afternoon nap. Philip almost believes this is all a twisted dream and she’ll get up any second with her child-like smile and airy gait, reducing all Philip can think of to shielding her from the wind, keeping her out of her own head and standing as tall and steady as he can when she leans against him.

It had been always his job to protect her.

She is buried off-state in a cemetery forty minutes away from Tivoli. The denuded smell of dug up earth mingles with the melodic purl of a fountain twenty feet away from where she’s laid to rest. The seven of them stand in a semicircle around the grave as Philip leans over the side of the casket with tears in his eyes. He leans in to give his mother one last kiss on the forehead and can’t bring himself to say _goodbye_. A breath away from her sleeping face, the quiet of her _goneness_ floods the air in his lungs. No one talks as they lower her into the ground.

Lukas stands right beside him, dressed in a black blazer jacket with dark jeans that stands at complete contrast with his shock of blond hair. Mirrors of Philip’s dark circles cast shadows beneath the bleu de france of his eyes. He looks haunted, staring wide eyed at Anne’s open grave with clenched fists on either side of him. Bo Waldenbeck has a hand on his shoulder. Philip’s fingernails graze the insides of his pockets with the need to touch him. He swallows the impulse like the bile at the back of his throat.

He knows what Lukas is thinking.

By the time it is over, Philip is suffocating with it. He wants to go home and under the collapsing weight of the late summer sky and against the choking tightness of his collar, he cannot decide which home he wants to go back to.

 

* * *

 

 

The whirl and rush of the wind bites into his skin through the visor of his helmet. Philip’s arms are circled around his waist, a hand angled upwards over his chest where he had taken the bullet. Still dressed in their funeral attire, they blow through the empty roads winding around the eonian cul de sac of Tivoli. A jolt of electric green, cutting across the endurance of its tedium, the sameness of its spaced houses and wooded backdrops that feel as wrong to him as Philip’s trembling chest pressed against his back.

He was six years old when Sally Waldenbeck had passed. The feel of her that used to remain just outside the reach of his memory now surges into him at the least expected moments. She had been locked behind the doorless rooms of his mind where emotion couldn’t reach. She had been the sleeping core of his heart, the smothered voice of his true self, a deeply aching part of him he had forgotten he once had. He had been quiet, duty bound, obedient. Focused on a plan of freedom he didn’t know why he craved so desperately with the wreckage of unsorted grief sedating him to feeling.

Now inhaling the heat of emotion ablaze inside him with Philip’s arms around him, he remembers her like she had never left. The curl of her mischievous smile, the smell of hyacinth she brought with her anywhere she went like an earthbound forest nymph, the motherly magic of her that softened everything she touched, even the hard edges of Bo Waldenbeck.

His hands tighten around the throttle, gaining speed and in the blown open rooms of his deserted memory, Lukas asks the forgiving ghost of his mother how he could ever apologize to Philip for killing his.

 

Fifty seven lakes and natural ponds scattered around Tivoli and it is always this one they are drawn to. Lukas can pinpoint the exact spots his life, along with Philip’s, had been turned upside down at the banks of it. Six feet away, he had stood with Philip in his arms while the terror of what they had seen in the cabin had them shaking in a kind of panic tight-roping on the edge of madness, the unbelief of still being alive wide in their eyes. Knee-deep in the cold water, he had fished out the gun he had thrown in it, just to keep his lie going. It had been his lie from the start. Never theirs. It was him that would rather let a killer walk away than admit he had wanted to touch Philip Shea more than he had ever wanted anything in his life.

Tommy and Tracy and Bella Milonkovic and Anne Shea. It had been him all along.

Sitting on the pebbly bank of the pond with Philip’s back to his chest, Lukas feels the impending collapse. Pressing against the backs of his eyes, a lightless black spreads inside him, raising bile in his mouth and draining the blood from his extremities. With the phantom warmth of Anne Shea’s hand on the back of his neck and the restless pounding of the gunshot wound on his chest that failed to kill him only for the boy in his arms, Lukas buries his face in the hollow of Philip’s neck, shutting his eyes close to the sound of his own breaking. The tideless surge of the lake before them nearly swallows his shattered plea. _I’m sorry. Philip, I’m so sorry. It's..my fault.. I'm-_

Bottomless brown grounds him as his chest heaves, trying desperately to draw air into his lungs and then there are hands in his hair, Philip pressing his forehead to his and the guilt ravages him from within, the weight of it so immense, he can’t even think around it. Philip keeps calling his name and he is a blur, crying against his crying face, kissing his tears and all he can feel is wet, wet, wet everywhere they touch and it feels a little bit like dying and it feels a little bit like staying alive and that’s what they have done since the day in the cabin. A point-blank smack on the head of a killer, a dip in water that haunts and they had stayed alive because the other was living and through spit and tears Lukas vows to live for Philip Shea for as long as he keeps breathing.

* * *

 


	4. Say It Again

* * *

 

Return to Red Hook High brings with it an exhausting routine that douses his days in a looping shadow. After almost never leaving the Caldwell farm since his mother died, Philip finds the dark hallways full of kind pretense and second hand sympathy. People he has never talked to before approach him during breaks with downturned mouths and curious eyes with questions about serial killers and kidnappings and finite versions of _what-did-it-feel-like_ s. Tragedy is always beloved as a story repeated; an evening gossip passed around with gravy and corndogs and in a town as small as Tivoli, what happened to Philip and Lukas is the most exciting thing that has happened in a century, although what they know is hardly the whole truth. There are only a very few among them that seem to sense the boundless silence of loss wrapped around him and give him enough berth to adjust the new weigth in his old spaces. Rose is one of them.

Lukas never leaves his side. He is still careful not to touch him when he knows people are around but always positions himself in way that puts him within an arm’s reach in any classrooms or corridor, like the aura of Philip’s presence is as essential to him as his is to Philip. He can see the longing in his eyes, the contemplation, the weighing of his options whirling like gears behind the ocean blue that has the same effect on him Helen’s flash drive has. Being so close to him, Philip aches in all the places Lukas doesn’t touch and yet he watches his aslant profile, all tense-jawed and shadowy-eyed, walking beside him across the same hallway he had hit him just a few weeks back for being too close and all he feels is a furious swell of pride and a consuming surge of selfish warmth that fills him to the brim.

In solitude, Lukas envelops him. There is always a part of him that touches Philip, his face buried in his hair, fingers twined to his, their legs tangled. He breathes memories into his ear, traces the mazarine veins on his hands like a riddle of his own making, mouths at the junction of his neck until his lips throb with abuse against his pulse. Lukas inhales the massive pain that spins webs around Philip and muffles it in the suffusing quiet of his closeness when it’s almost too hard to breathe. With each day Philip drowns in him, he regrets less and less that he has never learned to swim.

 

Specks of dust swirl in the gold of sunlight pooling through the break in his curtains. Philip watches their listless dance, listening to the hum of silence. This was a game he used to play with his mother. _Day stars,_ she used to say, smiling like she could see the universe painted across blenched wallpapers. It hadn't occurred to Philip yet, she probably was. They'd chase constellations in the lazy descent of things shriveled and dead. It was one of the first pictures he had taken.

A pale hand rises beside him, pointing towards the cavalcade of dust drowning in light. _Looks like stardust_ , Lukas says, bemused and utterly unaware.  

Philip closes his eyes.

When he kisses him, Lukas shatters into a downpour and the heat of longing two and a half weeks old sizzles across their skin. They breathe with trembling lips into each other, flush from head to toe without an inch to spare and they lose their hands in roots of hair, white-knuckled tight on hips, buried, aching hot under an arching back, supporting the curve of a neck hot with sweat. Philip gazes up into fiery blue and forgets the black capped shadow from his nightmares, forgets the slow spread of blood on hardwood, inches away from his face, forgets the ethereal whiteness of the carnations in his mother’s hair. Lukas descends and Philip forgets the crack of gunshot rebounding across the clearing, the blaring darkness of the trunk of a car out of control, the burning opalescence of hospital fluorescents. Lukas undulates, impossibly slow, his name pouring from his lips, and Philip forgets the roaring sound of silence, the emptiness pounding with loss around him, forgets the sense of never belonging.

A string of spit away from his lips, Lukas whispers his name. Nails scrape lightly down his navel and the warmth of his hand burrows between his legs. Philip’s head falls back, enunciating the glowing pleasure with a broken gasp. The blue grounds him, burns him, drowns him and Lukas mutters into his mouth, _Philip,_ he says. _I want to..._ He swallows. He licks his lips. His hold tightens.

Philip forgets himself.

 

The heat of him still throbbing in his core, Philip watches the way Sunday afternoon sunlight breaks across his skin. He watches the golden blaze of it spilling through the interstices of fair lashes, dropping shadows in the dip below his closed eyes. Watches the dark shade of his roughed up lips parted around deep breaths. The lethargic bob of his Adam’s apple. The transfixing rise and fall of his chest. The whole unfeasible, ruleless beauty of him.

When he sits up to reach for his drawer, nearly knocking over a roll of paper towels, Lukas rolls on his stomach, pulling Philip’s pillow and tucking it next to his own, his nose buried in its folds. A single eye, blue as indicolite against the stream of sunlight, watches him as Philip raises his camera and enshrines him in the fading black of polaroid film. Lukas keeps watching him as Philip watches him become everlasting.

Time prickles in silence.

 _I love you,_ Lukas says into sunlight.  

With a sound reminiscent of the distant rumble of thunder, something cracks open in Philip’s chest. He stares at him with parted lips, his whole body holding its breath. Lukas’ gaze is steady as the warmth of the sun on his bare back. Philip blinks the mist out of his eyes and falls right into him, taking his lips, kissing him through the breathlessness of brilliant incredulity, through the ache of flaming joy that seizes his heart. With Lukas’ hands in his hair, he lets out a nasal huff. _I’ve beaten you to it, you know,_ he smiles against his mouth.

Dark brows gather in confusion _. Wait… when,_ he asks and when Philip just raises his eyebrows in response, Lukas rolls them over, pinning Philip’s hands under his and they are both laughing, kicking against bedsheets and fighting for purchase with no intention of changing positions. With sunlit hair falling into his eyes, Lukas demands again, _when_.

Philip’s smile ebbs. He brushes the tip of his nose up against Lukas’ cheek, to the right, nuzzling into his hair. He breaths him in and replies, _when you were asleep. When I kissed you._

Lukas pulls away to hold his gaze and in the quiet of their slowing heartbeats, they hear the crackle of gravel as Gabe and Helen return from canoeing, listen to the elastic sound of laughter over car doors closing. Lukas leans to take his lips; an aurulent arch of warmth embodied. He kisses him in the same lazy pace of his mother’s day stars floating in sunlight, unhurried and bone-deep and in the heat of its winded aftermath, blue eyes pooling into brown, Lukas whispers to him, _say it again._

Philip does.  

* * *

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter only has Philip's POV, the next one will have only Lukas'. If it all goes according to plan, the last one will have them both again.  
> I love your comments, I love your encouragement, I love the way you love Eyewitness. Thanks for being here. 
> 
> PS: Eskimo kisses to D'oro for the logistics of spit distribution. (Wait, that sounds gay.)  
> Listen to: [Phantoms of Youth](https://open.spotify.com/track/3JiWzU0JEdraOl0hC4HrYY) by BRÂVES


	5. Lives Knotted Still

* * *

 

The brontide-like cheer and gasp of the AMA races breathes within their living room walls, casting dull reflections of the TV on the windows. His father sits beside him with a large glass of iced tea in hand and lets out an impressed  _holy shit_ when Dungey’s air time drags so long, he seems like a vibrantly colored aerial creature on his KMT, no longer bound by the rules of gravity. Watching him, Lukas feels the same prickling thrill at the very foundations of his bones that he has felt every time he has had his bike under him. The sense of being sprung tight in a box, ready to launch and reach. Reach for something impossible.

Neither of them are surprised when Dungey wins the 450 class. His father puts down his glass and places a hand on his knee, blue eyes meeting blue eyes.  _That’ll be you one day, son,_ he says with conviction, the ‘no matter what’ of it evident in the adjudication of his voice.

Lukas holds his gaze, allowing himself the moment to truly weigh his words. To differentiate between Bo Waldenbeck making a demand and showing unwavering support for something he has absolute faith in. He lets himself consider for a single moment that isn’t dyed leaden with fright and intimidation of his father’s rage sparked with a bottle from the top shelf, whether he had always intended to say  _I’m here for you_ , rather than  _you are here thanks to me_ , without knowing how to say it.

In the settled quiet of their house without the cling and chime of dishes from the kitchen or the continuous thrum of country music playing from the upstairs room, they sit side by side wearing the two sides of the same story on their shoulders. Two men more similar than either of them would like to admit in the aftermath of grief; both closed off, both lost in the means of reaching out and bridging the distance with the other. After eleven years of frightful obedience, Lukas searches the tired lines of his father's face and ponders the distinction between being afraid of the unmapped nature of him and being afraid of what he thought Bo Waldenbeck would do if he choose something his father wouldn’t.

With the abruptness of time halting in staggering realization, Lukas asks himself if they had both been using substitutes to fool the other into thinking that they had it all under control. 

In his mind, Sally Waldenbeck smiles at him.

 _I love motocross,_ he tells him, slowly, trying the words in his mouth, tasting what the truth on the tip of his tongue feels like. As the impending rest of his admission piles behind his throat with the weight of all of his lies, he hides the tremble of his hands between his legs. His father nods, patting his knee and Lukas swallows. Breathes. And he trusts his father like his mother did. His heart stutters but his voice does not.

_I love Philip too, dad._

Bo Waldenbeck looks down, swallows. Breathes. The hand on Lukas' knee tightens its hold. Then blue steady into blue, he nods again.  _It’ll work out,_ he says, pauses, adds,  _we’ll make it work out._

Truth tastes like sugar licked from the inside of his hand.

 

The brown of his eyes stirs something deep within him he has no name for. In the dense damp of Tivoli evenings doused with serein, Philip opens the door of Gabe Caldwell’s house to meet him and something shifts in the axis of his inner makings, clicking in place with a sound that reverberates through the halls of his bones. Sunlight drowns his hair in hazelnut as he pulls off his spare helmet and the thrill of having his bike roaring beneath him at the height of flight slams into him with both his feet planted on the ground. Six miles away from him, Philip’s voice a sleepless murmur on the phone at four am in the morning, he can see the entrancing red of his lips curve around tired words. Three days after kneeling between his legs in the upstairs room, the taste of him still tingles on the tip of his tongue. The smell of him sits suspended like fog in every inch of his lungs.

With each day he spends around him, the presence of Philip feels like something he remembers from memory. Through the sentinel darkness of nightmares that still haunt him, the better parts of his mind conjure chimerical images of him spun in light. An older Philip, happier, content, proud… loved. Always right beside him. The familiarity of these reveries so stark, it feels like something that has already happened in a past life.

The timebound part of his mind remembers the shock of kissing him for the first time, the incredulity pulsing in his veins when Philip had turned to him, hurt in his eyes and want on his lips. Remembers the hum of his blood against his eardrums when he had responded, swallowing his jagged gasp, pulling him in. The sense of falling.

He remembers his violent trembling by the pond, repeating a litany of  _if you hadn’t_ s. Breaking against him.

He remembers every shove, every punch, every unkind word that brought that vanquished look in his eyes; not one of surprise or anger but a look of recognition; a look that told more stories about Philip Shea’s past than his voice ever did.

He remembers the feel of his hold on the school’s rooftop, the brown of his eyes the only distance between him and the edge of the parapet. 

He remembers the exact moment he had almost destroyed all that was left of him, sitting across from him on a picnic table, belying everything Philip Shea was to accuse of him of everything he wasn’t. He remembers betraying him.

He remembers the intoxicating quiet of relief that had ruptured in his heart when he had kissed him under the tree, fingers tangled, lives knotted still.

He remembers breathing him in, melting into him, losing every conscious thought in the white-hot haze in his russet gaze. And in the absolute vastness of every day yet unlived, Lukas’ mind spins out of time’s laws and builds dreams for him. Reaching for something impossible.

He sees Philip laughing with the whole of life in his eyes, sees him teasing him with his silvery wit wrapped around his tongue, sees him trusting the world he touches again. He sees himself taking him to movies, holding his hand in the crowd of shopping malls, walking beside him with nothing but belonging in his skin and kissing him in front of the whole school with hands in his hair and abandon on his lips. Images come to him in the lull between two breaths whispered against Philip's lips, at the sight of his shy smile when Gabe Caldwell hugs him, in the listless embrace they share outside the barn after a day spent together and neither feels like leaving. They suffuse him like visions of vivid recollections from the future. Like memories waiting to be made. A déja vu dawning.

When Rose hands him a flyer announcing a party in Red Hook in a week, Lukas closes his eyes and lets his dreams lead him.

 

* * *

 


	6. Unfolding

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I apologize this chapter took longer to post than the previous ones. An unexpected family thing happened and I wasn't around.  
> I hope the length of it will make up for the delay in updating. 
> 
> If you can, listen to [this](https://open.spotify.com/track/6Nyfnxr9YrAwbbzMFG0526) while reading.

* * *

 

He glades across the shimmering face of water with the cerulean expanse of the summer sky incased beneath the surface. The blade of the oar in his hand, slips below with a hush and disrupts the reflection of a flock of blue-winged teals in flight. In the fluidity of the motion, he finds a deep, hypnotizing calm that trickles into him through the strain in his arms, pooling into the core of his being. Gabe mutters an encouragement behind him, voice low and reverent as if he too, is transfixed by the untouched tranquil of the lake spread around him. Philip feels, in the midst of such timeless quiescence, even Gabe’s whisper has a sound like nature in the way it refuses to be loud, intruding; human-made. He holds the rhythm, allowing his body to move in sync with Gabe’s, allowing his mind to be filled with the silence he had been trying to muffle in the noise of static he had surrounded himself with for weeks.

They pull the oars up into the canoe and drift through the water in the lassitude of their ceasing momentum. Gabe places a hand on his back, patting gently. _Philip, listen,_ he says and Philip listens. The subtle splash of water licking at the varnished wood he sits in, euphonious croons of the teals flying above, the buzz of crickets pulsing in the background. Philip closes his eyes and listens to the vast silence hidden beneath it all; the silence that breathes between the sighs of morning breeze.

For the first time in three weeks and four days, the memory of Anne Shea doesn’t wind him in breathless loss. He lets the quiet of her absence break through his skin and spill out of him, spreading across the clinquant surface of water and ebbing against the far shores like twilight mist. He lets his hands remember the memory of her warmth and his lungs inhale the smell of cigarette smoke sweetened with jasmine. He feels the roughness of her hands in his when they used to dance in the two-feet space between the couch and the TV stand and remembers plucking long strands of brown hair from his jackets, the same color as his. He hears the sound of her soft voice in the smog of New York City nights where they used to sit on the couch outside with her head on his shoulder and when she would raise a svelte hand at the distant, dull flicker of stars and tell him her wanweird tale wasn’t his and he was the best thing out of all her dreams.

The hot slide of tears catches the whisper of the breeze on his cheeks and Philip sighs around the ache in his throat. _I wish she could see this._

Gabe keeps his hand on his back and draws in a tremulous breath like he can feel the ghost of the desperate longing thrumming in Philip’s larynx. He gives his shoulder a slow, steady stroke and replies into the stillness.  
_I think she can, son,_ he says. _Because, love never leaves._

Helen’s _jams_ slowly become a sound he associates with road trips. Twice a week she drives him to the clinic in the city and little by little, she allows him to see sides of her beyond the cop and the protector; the imperceptible struggle holding the seams of her everyday life together, the earnest awkwardness in the way she tries new things. The ephemeral glimpses of her former self flickering in the erinite of her eyes; a spectral vision alive for a sharp, fleeting moment in the curve of her smile. He finds himself watching her and wondering about her, whether she used to like dancing, whether she used to dream about having kids of her own. He wonders the kind of life she had had before the walls of her mind were filled with forensic photographs of murdered children and every intention and objective of her existence had narrowed down to catching their killers.

He watches her and wonders whether they had both been saved from death by a hair’s breadth by something as impossible as _love._  

Singing along to a song Philip likely wouldn’t add to any of his mixes, she looks young and jaunty. Through the canopy of trees they are riding through, sunlight spills speckles of light across the hood of Gabe’s car that cast reflections on her face. He fishes his camera from his shoulder bag and snaps a picture of her. As he watches it develop, Helen glances away from the road and smiles at him, auburn hair let loose around her shoulders. _How long have you been taking pictures?_ she asks.

With the familiar, throbbing stutter of his heart, _we used to do this thing,_ Philip answers, his eyes on the picture developing in his hand. _Me and my mom, we would go to antique stores every weekend. A different one each time. It was a weird tradition we had that no one knew. She would find the addresses from the phonebook in the kitchen and we would get on the bus and ride halfway across the city to see this sleazy antique store in some dirty alley no one would go to._ He raises his head, looking out through the front window, at the disperse scatter of houses visible through the woods. _We would spend hours in there looking at things people used to have but didn’t want anymore, that’s why half the stuff in our house is second-hand, but yeah, we would go there and look at stuff and we’d make up stories about them. Mom…_ He swallows. _She was really good at that._

_One day we found this old Polaroid camera and when I asked her what its story was, she told me cameras don’t have stories. She said cameras were made to record stories and if you had one, you could tell amazing ones just with the pictures you take._

The clarity of his memory is so sharp it replaces the idyllic country view stretching around him. He feels tears in his eyes but talking about Anne Shea paints her phantom edges with color, making her more alive than she gets to be in the tight grey matter of his mind. Here, in this moment, he relives her.

 _I was just eight years old._ He laughs through tears.  _I believed her. I believed everything she said back then and on my ninth birthday, she bought me that camera._

Helen places a hand on top of his across the center console, squeezing lightly.  _Is that what you want to do?,_ she asks with a softness that’s her own.  _Tell stories with your pictures?_

Philip stares at the picture he just took. The younger spirit of Helen overlapping with the current image of her in haunting clarity.  _I don’t know,_ he says.  _Maybe._

Helen nods, gives a final squeeze to his hand and holds the wheel once again.  _You are going to need a darkroom._

She smiles young.

 

 

 _“Hey Philip, what’s up?”_  
_“The fricking bank sold my mother’s house._  
_“Shit, that fast?”_  
_“Yeah, life in the city.”_  
_“Are you okay?”_  
_“No, I’m just… I feel like this is all happening too fast. I don’t… I feel like I’m standing still and everything is moving too fast around me.”_  
_“Yeah… that’s how it feels to me too.”_  
_“I don’t want to do this, Lukas.”_  
_“What are you gonna do?”_  
_“Helen and Gabe want to drive me there… To collect our things.”_  
_“Oh. Shit. Do you... do you want me to come along?”_  
_“Actually… Lukas, can you take me there before they do? I just… I want to be prepared. I don’t want them to see me… you know. In case I flip out like before.”_  
_“Yeah, Philip, sure. When do you wanna go?”_  
_“After school? Today?”_  
_“Alright. What are you gonna tell Helen?”_  
_“I don’t know… just that we are going out?”_  
_“That works.”_  
_“Thank you, Lukas.”_  
_“I’ll see you at school in a bit.”_  
_“See you.”_

 

* * *

 

 

Lukas somehow cannot reconcile the thought of Philip Shea living in this house his whole life. Red brick walls and peeling white wood paint on the window frames, garbage containers half a feet away from a toy horse and an array of old furniture cluttering the dooryard, like the cramped spaces of the house behind the door couldn’t hold them in and eventually spewed it all up here like a haphazard garage sale. The air of otherworldliness hangs most prominently about Philip when he is here, walking around the plastic pots and rusted metal chairs with a kind of deep-rooted familiarity that makes Lukas abruptly miss him with a devastating urgency like Philip is on the verge of suddenly slipping hundreds of miles away. His eyes watch him and his hand tightens around his but it almost seems as if Philip Shea never belonged here either. As if instead of the brumous soot and smoke of the city and the pale scars of mistreatment he has kissed across his body, Philip was made of round wood houses by the lake, the balmy sense of summer rain on your skin and the kind of humbling wonderment the pink-hot warmth of sunsets fills you with to the brim. A nemophilist in a jungle of bricks and cement.

He keeps holding his hand while Philip unlocks the door and they stand at the threshold, unable to take the first step in. Lukas can all but feel the ghost of Ryan Kane lurking behind the door, almost expects to see his silhouette etched across the catchpenny wallpapers like the nuclear shadow of a bygone disaster, capped and dressed as human. He had asked, in the dead of the night with Phillip curled around him on a hospital bed sentineled by the dead of Anne Shea, if he was gone. The uncertainty had trembled on his lips, terrified of being denied the reality of his end. _Yes,_ Philip had answered, eyes near black in the dark of three AM vigil. _He is dead._ Then again. Into the crook of his neck. _He is dead._

Lukas can’t silence the part of him that wishes he was there when it happened just to have something to pit against the irrational doubt sprouting like poison ivy in the noctuary of his mind.

Philip doesn’t break down but Lukas teeters on the edge. When they finally have the courage to go in and when Philip stands in the middle of the stained wall-to-wall carpet, looking around him with the quiet unfurling of his grief exuding every fiber of his being, all Lukas can see is a gun pointed to his head, brown eyes wide with terror, lips quivering. All he hears is the deafening clank of the hammer of his gun being pulled. The command he was given as well as the ties thrown at his feet. _Tie him._

Lukas thinks despite the bullet that punched a hole in his lungs hundred and twenty miles away, this was the spot he had almost died.

Philip turns to him, eyes searching his face and then there are arms around his shoulders, his face tucked in the curve of his neck. Lukas holds him tight, fingers curled around his shoulders and the tip of his nose nestled in brown hair, as the ringing in his ears subsides and his heartbeat slows down. Together, in the middle of Anne Shea’s cluttered living room where even her ghost no longer resides, they wait the reality of their survival to check out, the whole absurd outside-chance of it to make sense in the feel of each other’s warmth.

Silence sighs in the sound of the house setting around its emptiness.

 _We are safe,_ Philip says, whispering against the shell of his ear.

Lukas nods.

_We are safe._

 

 

_Hey, did you tell Philip about the party?_

_Yeah, I did. Didn’t wanna come at first but I convinced him._

  
_Are you sure you want to do this, Lukas?_

 _Yeah._  
_Yeah Im sure._

_If Matt Pierce says anything I promise I’ll punch him in the face for you._

_LOL, thanks Rose._  
_You don’t need to though. If he says anything I’ll just challenge him to a race xD_

_He can't even ride a bicycle._

_Exactly xD xD_

_xD_

_Rose… There is something I want to tell you._

_What is it?_

_I have been wanting to apologize for a while. I don’t know how to put things into words._

_You already apologized when we broke up. It’s alright Lukas. I get it._

_No I... I didn't apologize for the right things._  
_And I never apologized for the video thing._  
_I’m really so fricking sorry._

 _Well. I don't know about the right things to apologize for. I just know it was harder for you than it was for me._  
_And as for the video... I liked being seen with you like that. I liked that people thought we were doing it._  
_But yeah._  
_I guess it was kinda shitty you did that :)_

_It was more than shitty. I’m sorry Rose._

_It’s okay Lukas. Thank you for apologizing._

:(

_I looked pretty cool tho, didn’t I :P_

  
_LOL, yes you did._

 

 

In the ink-black night leaking shadow vestiges at the window sills of the Caldwell farm, Ray Price’s voice filter through the door left ajar into Philip’s room. Lukas looks up from his textbook and notices that Philip has stopped dabbling with photo filters on his phone where he has been lying on his back with his head on his belly. There is a lucent glisten in his russet eyes that drown in the amber light of his bedside lamp. When Lukas cards his fingers through his hair in askance, he tilts his head to meet his eyes, a small smile of bafflement flickering on his lips. He looks waylaid.

 _Mom loved this song,_ he explains.  _Don’t know if I ever told you, she loved dancing. She loved it so much she’d beg Billy to take her out every night he was around. Sometimes she’d even dance without music. Always tried to get me to dance with her. Haggard and Charley Pride, Tammy Wynette, Old Hank…_ He nods towards the door.  _Ray Price. She was old school like them._

Lukas watches his features soften, his chatoyant eyes lost to the ceiling, his mind whirling back through time, reconstructing the house of his childhood, spilling sunlight into its rooms, resurrecting the life and warmth of Anne Shea from the sillage of her story. Lukas hums his encouragement, waiting for Philip to continue while letting his fingers burrow deeper in his hair.

 _We had this old radio in the kitchen we got from a neighbor,_ he says voice drenched in memory. Lukas closes his eyes to the sound of his voice. The sound of him unfolding.  

 _It even had a Hank Jr. cassette in it. A cassette, Lukas. God, it was an ancient thing. Always smelled like burnt plastic. Mom would switch it on in the morning and come to my room singing. She’d pull me out of bed and dance with me in the middle of the room. She’d laugh so much, spinning me around, ducking low to twirl under my arm_.  _I never knew what I was doing or why we were doing it but…_ Philip quiets and closes his eyes. Swallows.  _I always loved it,_ he whispers into the silent arrival of healing, his redamancy shimmering at the corners of his eyes.

Lukas watches the obtuse-angled arch of his lashes, the prominent pull of the muscles in his jaw, the way his chest swells with feeling.  _Get up,_ he tells him. He drags him up to his feet through complaints and protests and laughters of surprise.  _C’mon, get up. Get up, Philip. Get up, get up!_

At the foot of Philip’s bed, he wraps an arm around his waist; palms crossed snug, flush from chest down, he draws him into the listless flow of the music drizzling over them from downstairs. Philip snorts into the tug of his easy sway, color high up on his cheeks. Lukas kisses his grin to the sharp edge of his jawline, pulling him closer, dousing him in the tide of their Lethe. In the lull between the bridge and the chorus, Philip melts into him.  _You are an idiot,_ he mutters to his ear. Lukas chuckles into his hair.

He feels the tip of Philip’s nose brush against his cheek, feels him breathe him in, the way the rise of his chest fills every crevice in his arms, the way he fits right in, right against, right with him. On his back, he feels Philip’s hand tight around the shirt he is wearing. In the dizzying closeness of their dilatory dance, he finds a kind of familiarity he has never felt before. His face buried in Philip’s hair, he moves with him in an unhurried spin, socks soft on hardwood floor, his heart thrumming with the wistful sense of gazing into the incalescence of the offing, overflowing with the high of dreaming.

 _‘If anyone should ever write my life story_  
_For whatever reason there might be_  
_You'd be there between each line of pain and glory_  
_'Cause you're the best thing that ever happened to me_  
_You're the best thing that ever happened to me’_

In the receding coda, Philip’s arms enclose around his neck and Lukas tastes his release in the salt on his lips.

  

* * *

 

 

_Do you still feel the silence? You know, of your mom._

_Only when I listen to it._

_Don’t you… don’t you feel guilty about it? Not hearing it all the time?_

_I used to. More so when I could actually remember things about her ‘cause I was so small when she died. It used to make me panic._

_It makes me panic too._

_I don’t feel guilty anymore though._

_How come?_

_Because now, when I listen to the silence, it isn’t empty._

 

 

* * *

 

 

_All the way to Red Hook, baby._

_._

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was a ride in bliss and a ride in pain. I loved every second of it despite how much introspection I ended up doing because of it. I wanted more than anything to put the magnitude of Philip's loss and grieving into words and examine the shit out of it (pardon my French).  
> Thank you for sticking with me and sharing your love for Eyewitness with me through this journey. 
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> There are a few trivia I'd like to note here in case anyone gets curious how ridiculous I can get when writing:  
> * Through extensive two hour research into the ghastly forums of the interwebs, I have confirmed that you can stay at hospitals as a companion with a patient in the US. So that's actually a thing that happens and a thing you can request if a loved one is hospitalized (I hope you never have to).  
> * Anne Shea's funeral is delayed due to it being a criminal case. The autopsy and toxicology tests may take up to two weeks to complete at Office of Chief Medical Examiner. In my timeline, it took about a week and half. You can find more information [here](https://www.ocme.dhhs.nc.gov/).  
> * [Ryan Dungey](https://www.ryandungey.com/) is an actual motocross racer. He didn't win the 2016 450 Class race but he did win the year before. I tweaked it a little to better suit my purposes.  
> * The song Lukas and Philip dance to is You Are the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me by Ray Price. I was headcanoning Anne Shea listening to it and singing it to her little son because I'm a masochistic bastard. You can listen to it [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H-GCS8Y9Qk) if you are also a masochistic bastard.  
> * Okay this one was actually a bitch to research and calculate cause yOU AMERICANS ARE WEIRDOS WITH YOUR SMELLY IMPERIAL SYSTEM (smelly because feet, geddit?)  
> Philip is from New York, Lukas from Tivoli and Helen is from Buffalo. No one cares where Ryan Kane is from. BUT I MADE YOU [A MAP](https://s29.postimg.org/c984mvwxj/Ekran_Al_nt_s.png)!  
> According to research Tivoli is two hours away from New York by car, about 30 minutes from Poughkeepsie and near seven hours away from Buffalo.  
> I researched this for a single sentence in a nearly 10K word fanfiction. I have issues.
> 
>  
> 
> Thank you for one of the best fandom experiences of my life. Some of you especially, you know who you are, have become a second family to me. Consider this my gift to you. Love you all. Let's keep fighting.


End file.
